Yet another instalment in my guitar controller saga… technically, this project is done. Everything works as it should, however there’s still some cosmetic work left to be done. You’ll notice it is still unpainted and the top part of the controller’s body is held in place with an elastic band… not optimal.
But it does work and here’s proof:
This controller is nothing by itself but a bunch of buttons. It only sends out MIDI notes and to achieve anything beyond that requires some programming. For this, I once again turned to Plogue’s Bidule.
In the patch I made, the neck buttons were divided into three groups that randomly select audio files for playback from three different pools: subjects, verbs and complements as spoken by my wife. That gives four buttons per grammatical groups and I decided to exploit that by assigning a different playback speed to each of these buttons.
The three central buttons on the guitar controller’s body trigger playback of the selected sound file. Pressing a neck button by itself only selects an audio file and does not produce a sound until one of the trigger buttons is pressed. The first two trigger playback from the beginning of the file and the third button triggers in reverse from the end. One thing I’d like to try is setting one of the first two buttons to pick a random start position… it might introduce some interesting possibilities.
This is how I implemented the guitar analogy for this patch. Pressing neck buttons is analogous to fretting a string (select audio file), while pressing trigger buttons is akin to picking notes. Together, these two actions produce a given sound.
The sounds are fed to the Mobius looper, which I control with my feet through my Trigger Finger.